The second common failure is treating onboarding as administration. Most onboarding programmes are built around paperwork: contracts signed, policies acknowledged, compliance training ticked off. These things matter. But they do not create belonging, and belonging is what keeps people. The third failure is speed. Businesses are often so eager to get a new hire productive that they compress onboarding into a week or push the person into work before they have the context to do it well. The result is a new employee who is performing at 50% capacity, feeling exposed, and wondering whether they made the right decision - while their manager wonders the same thing about them.